Sarah Herron's disability is advantage on 'Bachelor'

Of all the women Bachelor Sean Lowe could have picked for his first one-on-one date, he chose Sarah Herron, 25, an ad exec from Colorado who was born with only one full arm.

Herron, one of 16 women still in the running for Lowe's heart, said in a press call today that, yes, maybe her disability, the result of a birth defect, has given her an advantage.

"It helped me stand out and catch his attention, and I'm grateful for that."

She says, "I think what happened is I introduced myself to Sean and made an impression and he saw me as a unique, strong, courageous individual and that I deserved this opportunity as much as anybody else." It made her feel, she says, "like the most lucky girl in the world."

And their date was no picnic, although they had one afterward. The two jumped off a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles, doing a free-fall for 300 feet. Although we saw her screaming as it happened, she said today it was "cool" and "adventurous."

The decision to come on the show has been an adventure, too, admits Herron. "I was nervous. I knew I was putting myself out there and I knew America was going to see me in my most vulnerable state."

But she "decided to bite the bullet and apply" after seeing Lowe, 29, on Emily Maynard's season of The Bachelorette. "I was really interested in him. He's incredibly attractive."

When she was accepted for the show, she says, "It was kind of this dream come true. I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around it."

Now, she has become something of a role model. "I've been doing a little reading of comments online and on some message boards. It seems to be incredibly positive and I get overwhelming feedback from women saying I've inspiring them and motivated them." She continues, "I truthfully went on the show to meet Sean, but if I'm a role model for anybody, I'm honored that people perceive me like that."

Sarah Herron and Sean Lowe toast each other on 'The Bachelor.'(Photo: Todd Wawrychuk, ABC)

It wasn't something she had thought about. "I was worried about Sean liking me. I was never was concerned what the public was going to say or people were going to say. I've grown up with it my whole life. I'm not concerned about being talked about."

Lowe, she says, immediately put her at ease about everything. "Here's the thing, I think most women have their insecurities whether it's your weight or your style or the color of your hair. Everybody has something about them that they don't feel awesome about. For me, my barrier is having one arm."

She brought it up with Lowe on the first night they met and, she says, "It was important for me to let him know everything that I could ... and be open and honest." And, she adds, "He made it clear he was comfortable and we could just move on."

Herron says the Bachelor women, who can get pretty catty as they compete, were also "very, very, very sweet. The girls were welcoming and encouraging, and immediately just bonded with me so well. I feel like it's very strange how close I got with the girls and they all just wanted me to succeed and do well."

So far, anyway.

And if she doesn't end up with Sean, who's a good match for him? "I honestly really think Lesley M.," says Herron, referring to the 25-year-old political consultant whose hometown is Fort Smith, Ark. "I think she's a wonderful girl with a great career and she's beautiful and has an amazing body and she's so cool. I really see this great spark happening between them. I think Lesley M. is a possible contender."

But stay tuned, Herron says. "The next episode is going to be a pretty big shocker. There's a lot of drama that happens next Monday night. It's going to be interesting to see how it all unfolds. We're all finally settled into the house and seeing true colors come out, and I think things are going to start to get interesting."

Schools must provide sports for disabled, US says

Disabled students could join traditional teams if officials can make "reasonable modifications" to accommodate them

BY PHILIP ELLIOTT, ASSOCIATED PRESS

(Credit: AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Students with disabilities must be given a fair shot to play on a traditional sports team or have their own leagues, the Education Department says.

Disabled students who want to play for their school could join traditional teams if officials can make “reasonable modifications” to accommodate them. If those adjustments would fundamentally alter a sport or give the student an advantage, the department is directing the school to create parallel athletic programs that have comparable standing to traditional programs.

“Sports can provide invaluable lessons in discipline, selflessness, passion and courage, and this guidance will help schools ensure that students with disabilities have an equal opportunity to benefit from the life lessons they can learn on the playing field or on the court,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement announcing the new guidance Friday.

The groundbreaking order is reminiscent of the Title IX expansion of athletic opportunities for girls and women four decades ago and could bring sweeping changes to school budgets and locker rooms for years to come.

Activists cheered the changes.

“This is a landmark moment for students with disabilities. This will do for students with disabilities what Title IX did for women,” said Terri Lakowski, who for a decade led a coalition pushing for the changes. “This is a huge victory.”

It’s not clear whether the new guidelines will spark a sudden uptick in sports participation. There was a big increase in female participation in sports after Title IX guidance instructed schools to treat female athletics on par with male teams. That led many schools to cut some men’s teams, arguing that it was necessary to be able to pay for women’s teams.

Education Department officials emphasized they did not intend to change sports traditions dramatically or guarantee students with disabilities a spot on competitive teams. Instead, they insisted schools may not exclude students based on their disabilities if they can keep up with their classmates.

Federal laws, including the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, require states to provide a free public education to all students and prohibit schools that receive federal money from discriminating against students with disabilities. Going further, the new directive from the Education Department’s civil rights division explicitly tells schools and colleges that access to interscholastic, intramural and intercollegiate athletics is a right.

The department suggests minor accommodations to incorporate students with disabilities onto sports teams. For instance, track and field officials could use a visual cue for a deaf runner to begin a race.

Some states already offer such programs. Maryland, for instance, passed a law in 2008 that required schools to create equal opportunities for students with disabilities to participate in physical education programs and play on traditional athletic teams. And Minnesota awards state titles for disabled student athletes in six sports.

Increasingly, those with disabilities are finding spots on their schools’ teams.

“I heard about some of the other people who joined their track teams in other states. I wanted to try to do that,” said Casey Followay, 15, of Wooster, Ohio, who competes on his high school track team in a racing wheelchair.

Current rules require Followay to race on his own, without competitors running alongside him. He said he hopes the Education Department guidance will change that and he can compete against runners.

“It’s going to give me the chance to compete against kids at my level,” he said.

Some cautioned that progress would come in fits and starts initially.

“Is it easy? No,” said Brad Hedrick, director of disability services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and himself a hall-of-famer in the National Wheelchair Basketball Association. “In most places, you’re beginning from an inertial moment. But it is feasible and possible that a meaningful and viable programming can be created.”

A Child With Down Syndrome Keeps His Place at the Table

By GEORGE ESTREICH

IT’S rare that our daily lives adhere to dramatic form. But as reported onToday.com/Moms (“Waiter hailed as hero after standing up for boy with Down syndrome”), among other places, a little morality play took shape a few days ago in a Houston restaurant.

According to the Today.com article, the Castillo family — Eric, Kim and their 5-year-old son, Milo, who has Down syndrome — were having dinner at Laurenzo’s Prime Rib when a family nearby asked to be seated elsewhere.

As the waiter, Michael Garcia, recounted to the NBC affiliate KPRC-TV in Houston: “I heard the man say, ‘Special needs children need to be special somewhere else.’ My personal feelings took over, and I told him, ‘I’m not going to be able to serve you, sir.’ ”

“ ‘How could you say that?’ ” Mr. Garcia said he asked the man before he left the restaurant. “ ‘How could you say that about a beautiful 5-year-old angel?’ ”

For many people, this will be a simple feel-good story. But as the father of an 11-year-old girl with Down syndrome, I found the story more complicated. Beyond its satisfying ending, you can learn a lot about the conflicted place of Down syndrome in the world. The casual insensitivity of the patron’s remark, while not always expressed this blatantly, is all too common. And whether you call Mr. Garcia a hero or not, he unquestionably did the right thing, and his kind of bravery makes an enormous difference in the lives of people with disabilities.

As Ms. Castillo pointed out, he put his job on the line. Even more inspiring, he knew the Castillo family, who are regulars at the restaurant, and he acted in the name of connection, denying the very separation — between “special” and “normal” — that the unidentified patron implied.

Ms. Castillo’s characterization of her son also stood out because it broke through the prescribed roles of the story. Her description is loving and positive, yet she emphasizes ordinary qualities as well as angelic ones. She said her son likes to give hugs, but is also occasionally “obnoxious which, like any other 5-year-old, he can be.”

She also noted that Milo has friends “both with and without Down syndrome.” That detail stayed with me, not only because it is true to my experience but also because it suggests how far we’ve come. The history of disability in our country is mostly tragic. During decades of routine institutionalization and sterilization, a shared preschool — let alone friendship, or being a valued regular customer at a Houston restaurant —was not on the table. If there were a slogan for those grim decades, “let them be special somewhere else” would sum things up pretty well.

Most of the progress for children with Down syndrome in the United States — their right to go to school, for instance — is recent and gained momentum, in part, from a recognition that “somewhere else” often meant an institutional horror no human being should ever have to experience. Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 hidden-camera exposé of the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island was instrumental in showing exactly how grim conditions could be. That exposé was one small part of a tidal change in which advocates for the disabled inspired by the civil rights movement, committed parents and others fought for the things that today’s parents take for granted. When our daughter Laura was born, my wife and I often wondered about the future. But we did not wonder whether she would be allowed to go to kindergarten.

Our advances, however, are still a work in progress. While it’s true that open bigotry is less common than it used to be, the absence of direct hostility is not the same as the absence of ignorance. The word “retard” is common in the schoolyard and on our screens: while our taboos about difference shift with incredible speed, slurs about intellectual disability often get a pass. From the movies “Tropic Thunder” to “The Hangover,” from Rahm Emanuel to Ann Coulter, “retard” still tends to be seen as edgy, not bigoted. Of course, the issues in question transcend labels: in the Houston restaurant, the word “special” was used as an insult, which only testifies to the resilience of prejudice. Any word can be repurposed for contempt.

What is it about intellectual disability that we find so difficult? Sometimes it seems our focus on “positive” qualities, like being “cute” or “happy” or “sweet,” is meant to compensate for disability. We’re a long way from seeing all human beings as part of a single continuum. We also, it has to be said, do a lot better with children than adults — perhaps because historically we imagine adults with Down syndrome as children. A child with Down syndrome may have a place at the table, but adults are a different matter. In housing and employment, their place is uncertain; the recent scandal in New York State with rampant, unchecked abuse in group homes should give pause to anyone who thinks that our American history with disability has come to a happy ending.

It’s moving to me that Milo Castillo’s story takes place in a restaurant, given the civil rights history of lunch counters and water fountains. What’s a more visceral expression of belonging than where we’re allowed to eat? Where else would manners and rights intersect? As presented in the television report, the opinion voiced by the unidentified patron — “be special somewhere else” — is seen as a shocking instance of rudeness. It is. But more significantly, it’s the sentiment that, when widespread, makes it possible for people to lose rights in the first place.

Dehumanizing practices depend on dehumanizing ideas. Instead of seeing the scene in the restaurant as a story with a heroic resolution, we might see it as a debate carried out in words and actions. Taking a kid with Down syndrome to a restaurant is a statement: he’s a family member first, and he belongs. Saying that the kid shouldn’t be there, as the patron did, is one response; Mr. Garcia’s principled refusal to provide service is yet another. That scene, tidy as it is, is only one part of a long American conversation about who does and doesn’t belong.

Beneath the human interest story, in other words, is a question about who counts as human. For parents of children with Down syndrome like me, every daily act is an answer. What I live for, though, is the day when the question doesn’t come up.

Medicaid Long-Term Services and Supports, and Home and CommunityBased Services: The Changing Landscape

Healthcare and LTSS mechanisms and financing for low-income people with disabilities of all ages have been undergoing significant changes in recent years. States are increasingly requiring that Medicaid beneficiaries with disabilities and seniors mandatorily enroll in managed care with the dual goals of cost saving and improved health outcomes.
The 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) authorized a multistate demonstration to enroll people who are dually eligible for Medicare and full Medicaid benefits in managed care plans. Some of the demonstrations will also transition LTSS services into the managed care system. Slated to begin in 2013 in some states, the demonstrations aim to generate savings as well as address the gaps and instances of financial and service misalignment between Medicare and Medicaid. Moreover, beginning in 2014, the ACA will expand Medicaid to cover millions of low income, uninsured individuals, including many with disabilities. Some states that participate in the expansion will likely require
that these new Medicaid beneficiaries also enroll in managed care.
(Read the FULL story here)